Sun Valley Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Sun Valley is a northeastern San Fernando Valley neighborhood between Burbank and Pacoima, organized around San Fernando Road and Sunland Boulevard. Predominantly single-family homes mixed with industrial and gravel-pit land along the Tujunga Wash.
Four categories moved in Sun Valley this March — two one-month below-trend signals and two sustained multi-month structural shifts. The overall shape is broadly downward across property crime, with no spikes or rare-event signals in the mix.
Motor vehicle theft is the sharpest single-month signal: current 12-month volume sits at 270 against a baseline of 417.94, down 39.9% year-over-year. Theft from vehicle also ran below trend this month, off 20.5% against the prior 12 months (276 vs. 347). Burglary's move is structural rather than a one-month dip — a sustained shift lower, with 168 incidents over the current 12 months versus 230 in the year before, a 27.0% decline. Everything else, including robbery, aggravated assault, and vandalism, came in within its usual range.
Notable signals 2
Motor Vehicle Theft
The past 12 months saw 270 incidents — about 35% below the 418 average from prior years.
Theft from Vehicle
The past 12 months saw 276 incidents — about 29% below the 387 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Motor Vehicle Theft has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 270, down 40% from 449 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 168, down 27% from 230 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through March 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Sun Valley compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month motor vehicle theft volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable motor vehicle theft levels.”
Historic South-Central
272 incidents over the past 12 months — 2 above Sun Valley's 270.
Open page →Westchester
266 incidents over the past 12 months — 4 below Sun Valley's 270.
Open page →Vermont Square
277 incidents over the past 12 months — 7 above Sun Valley's 270.
Open page →Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Sun Valley, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from SFPD's open dataset, mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories, and aggregated to neighborhood × category × month. Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.